"Today's the day," whispers a woman urgently. "We're building a new city. Follow the path." We do as we are told. A woman irons in a tree, a man plays a piano under a canopy of green leaves, a woman sleeps peacefully in her bed.

In the centre of the park, dominated by an eerily lit clock tower, these surreal scenes of domestic life widen. There is a knitted model of London, and a map of the world. Near the clock tower, people build structures from bamboo. The security guards (pictured) eye them uneasily, and an order comes to push the people back. One man and his family refuse to leave their home. Tensions rise.

Actually, they don't rise very much in this limp cross-London community project created by Wildworks, intended as the centrepiece of the World Stages collaboration between eight London theatres. All those people, all that effort and all that talent – squandered on an evening that is too thin on a narrative level, never giving its audience characters to care about or despise. It is lacking in both spectacle and mythic resonance.

At a time when the Occupy movement is examining new social structures created by and for the people most failed by the old ones, and when millions are displaced around the world because of the whims of the market, there has rarely been a more urgent need for a project such as Babel. But it fails Londoners and theatregoers. It is too politically naive, too lacking in complexity and texture; it never connects the stories of the city in a meaningful way. It may have brought its participants and performers together, but it doesn't involve its audience.